UN warns the scale of dredging has a devastating effect on biodiversity and coastal communities.

Almost six billion tonnes of sand and other sediment are extracted from the world’s seas and oceans every year on average, according to the United Nations.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warned on Tuesday of the devastating toll on biodiversity and coastal communities, adding that the scale of dredging was growing, with dire consequences.

“The scale of environmental impacts of shallow sea mining activities and dredging is alarming,” said Pascal Peduzzi, who heads UNEP’s analytics centre GRID-Geneva.

He pointed to the effects on biodiversity, as well as on water turbidity, and noise effects on marine mammals.

The UNEP launched a global data platform on sediment extraction in marine environments, Marine Sand Watch, which uses artificial intelligence to track and monitor dredging activities of sand, clay, silt, gravel and rock in the world’s marine environment.

It uses so-called Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals for ships combined with artificial intelligence to identify the operations of dredging vessels, including in hotspots like the North Sea and the East Coast of the United States.

The signals emitted by the vessels allow “access to the movements of every ship on the planet”, Peduzzi was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

‘Gigantic proportions’

The platform estimates that out of some 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel used by humanity each year, between four and eight billion tonnes come from the world’s oceans and seas.

“This represents six billion tonnes on average every year, or the equivalent of more than one million dump trucks every day,” Peduzzi said.

He pointed out that “our entire society depends on sand as a construction material”. At the same time, sand plays a vital environmental role, including protecting coastal communities from rising sea levels.

Data analysed for the years 2012 to 2019 shows the scale of dredging is growing and that the world is approaching the natural replenishment rate of 10 to 16 billion tonnes of sediment washed into its oceans each year.

This is especially concerning for regions where dredging is more intense and extraction already substantially surpasses the sediment budget from land to sea, said the report.

Tipping point

While the tipping point has not been reached at a global level, Peduzzi cautioned during a press conference that in some localities, “we are extracting it faster than it can replenish itself”.

“This is not sustainable,” he added.

The North Sea, Southeast Asia and the East Coast of the United States are among the areas with the most intense marine dredging.

However, international practices and regulatory frameworks vary widely.

While some countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, have banned marine sand export in the last 20 years, others lack any legislation or monitoring programmes.

China, followed by the Netherlands, the US and Belgium have the biggest dredging fleets, Arnaud Vander Velpen, a GRID-Geneva sand industry expert, said.

Peduzzi described extraction vessels as giant vacuums, cleaning seabeds, and “sterilising” them, warning that this leads to the disappearance of oceanic microorganisms and threatens biodiversity.

Activists in both countries complain that regulators prioritize the economic well-being of polluting industries over the environment and public health.

This story was co-published with Public Health Watch and Houston Landing.

People living on the east side of Harris County, Texas, have an unlikely bond with residents of Berre-l’Étang in southern France: They all inhale toxic chemicals from plants owned by LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies.

In the summer of 2020, LyondellBasell’s 2,471-acre industrial complex in Berre-l’Étang had more than half a dozen major incidents in which flares released large amounts of chemicals into the air. Thick clouds of smoke drifted over the community of 14,000. The flares burned so brightly, photographs show, that the normally pitch-black night was replaced by what looked like a prolonged sunset. The smoke carried benzene and other toxic substances to Marseille, France’s second-most-populous city, 10 miles away.

A year later in Texas, two major chemical releases at LyondellBasell facilities in Harris County forced residents of Jacinto City, Galena Park, and neighboring towns to shelter indoors. One of those incidents killed two workers and sent dozens to area hospitals.

Last year Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop examined LyondellBasell’s record in Harris County, and that project made us curious about the company’s performance outside the United States. We chose to look at Berre-l’Étang because both it and Harris County are at the center of their countries’ petrochemical industries — and both struggle to balance the economic benefits they gain with the concerns of residents who are breathing noxious fumes.

In eastern Harris County, 10 oil refineries process 2.6 million barrels of crude oil a day, and thousands more facilities store or manufacture the chemicals the industry uses and produces. Petrochemical plants loom over houses and playgrounds. A terminal holding millions of barrels of chemicals is seven blocks from a middle school.

Berre-l’Étang lies in one of the most heavily industrialized areas of France, where it and nine other towns surround a 60-square-mile lake, Étang de Berre. A 2017 study of some of those towns found that 63 percent of the population had at least one chronic disease. The French national average is 37 percent.

Local officials in France appear to have even less power to deal with industrial emissions than those in Texas, where state regulations are notoriously lax. Activists in both countries complain that regulators prioritize the economic well-being of polluting industries over the environment and public health.

In 2018, Éliane Jurado, a retired teacher living in Berre-l’Étang, created a citizens platform, LibAIRté, pledging to “defend the air quality of my grandchildren until my last breath.” LyondellBasell’s 2020 flaring — a process that burns off excess gas and relieves pressure — galvanized support for the movement and forced the city government to organize a town-hall meeting.

But in the end, Jurado says, nothing happened. She left Berre-l’Étang in 2021 and is still looking for someone to take over LibAIRté’s Facebook group, which at one point had 1,300 members.

A LyondellBasell spokesperson said the company declined to comment for this story.

read more : https://grist.org/health/in-a-small-french-town-where-houston-based-lyondellbasell-is-a-fixture-residents-complain-of-unending-pollution/

A new study underscores an enduring nuclear legacy as Japan releases wastewater from Fukushima into the Pacific.

This story was originally published by Grist.

A new study found trace amounts of nuclear waste in sea turtles in the Marshall Islands and five locations in the continental United States, underscoring the enduring legacy of nuclear testing and weapons development.

The analysis, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, looked at turtle and tortoise shells at locations tied to nuclear testing including Southwestern Utah, the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range in Arizona.

Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study along with 22 other researchers, said the team found evidence of uranium radionuclides in the shells of turtles and tortoises at all five sites. He added that contamination amounts were so small that it’s doubtful the animals experienced health impacts.

“If you take a paperclip and divide it a million times, if you take a millionth piece of that and divide it another million times, that’s about the same quantity that we’re measuring in some of these shells,” Conrad said.

Still, Conrad says the findings are significant because they illustrate how turtles and tortoises, in part due to their long lives and metabolic processes, are able to retain nuclear contamination in their tissues. According to Conrad, turtle shells grow in a sequential style, similar to tree rings, and record isotopic elements such as uranium-236 from spent nuclear fuel.

The study is the first that Conrad knows of that identifies nuclear contamination in turtles in the Marshall Islands, but it’s far from the first to find evidence of historical, military-related pollution in wildlife there. In 2019, a U.S. Army study found dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs, and arsenic in fish around Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls, which has served as a U.S. military base for decades and is currently part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.

PCBs are synthetic organic chemicals that are long-lasting in the environment and can be harmful to human health. Another recent study found pollution in fish, including high levels of mercury and lead, surrounding several Marshallese atolls.

The paper also builds upon decades of research illustrating how nuclear waste bioaccumulates in sea creatures. Conrad said the study’s methodology of analyzing shells is new, but noted past studies have found previous evidence of radionuclides in turtles. A 2020 study of sea turtles in the Montebello Islands found contamination of turtle eggs and tissues.

The findings coincide with Japan’s decision to release treated, contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The move prompted China to ban seafood from Japan, inspired protests in Fiji and South Korea and has particularly frustrated Indigenous peoples in the Pacific who have spent decades fighting against the dumping of nuclear waste in the region. Between 1946 and 1958, the Marshall Islands were the site of 67 U.S. nuclear tests, leading to health and environmental harms that the Indigenous people of the islands continue to grapple with.

Conrad hopes the study inspires more research into turtles and tortoises and how they record nuclear history.

“They’re taking in all of this information, they’re depositing this, and they’re acting as a really critical library for us to be able to reconstruct the history of the world in different ways,” Conrad said. “They’re experiencing what humans are experiencing and they’re able to record this in a very unique way.”

Supposedly eco-friendly cups are still coated with a thin layer of plastic, which scientists have discovered can leach chemicals that harm living creatures.

The world goes through hundreds of billions of single-use coffee cups every year—and most aren’t recycled. So major coffee chains’ switch to paper cups is a good step, right? Not quite.

A recently published study shows that paper cups can be just as toxic as conventional plastic ones if they end up littered in our natural environment. Seemingly eco-friendly paper cups are coated with a thin layer of plastic to keep their contents from seeping into the paper, and this lining can emit toxic substances. “There are chemicals leaching out of these materials,” says lead author Bethanie Carney Almroth, an associate professor of environmental science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

When trying to assess the environmental impact of takeaway coffee cups, most experiments have focused on plastic lids and polystyrene cups. Paper cups have long been spared scrutiny. To address this oversight, Carney Almroth and her colleagues tested the effects of paper and plastic cups on midge larvae, which are commonly used in toxicity tests. The cups were placed in temperate water or sediment and left to leach for up to four weeks. The larvae were then kept in aquariums containing the water or sediment tainted by the paper and plastic cups. Regardless of the source of the contamination, the larvae grew less in the sediment, and exposure to the tainted water also hindered their development.

The ecotoxicologists didn’t perform chemical analyses to see which substances had leached from the paper cups into the water and sediment, though Carney Almroth suspects that a mix of chemicals caused the damage. But it’s hard to say more, given that it’s not known which materials are present. “This would all be much easier if companies were required to tell us what they use in their products,” she says.

Coffee cups are made of a complex mixture of synthetic materials and chemicals. Manufacturers add processing aids, heat stabilizers, and other substances, many of which are known to be toxic. Even if plant-derived materials are used—such as polylactic acid, a material derived from corn, cassava, or sugarcane that’s used to coat paper cups—cup makers often add a number of other chemicals during processing.

Chemical analyses can sometimes shed light on the composition of the substances present in a plastic or paper cup, but even these tests can’t always identify what’s there, says Jane Muncke, who is an environmental toxicologist by training and now managing director of the Food Packaging Forum, a Switzerland-based science communication organization. The exact substances are “unknown not only to the scientists who carry out these analyses, but also to the people who produce and sell the packaging.” During the manufacture of plastic-containing products, unintentional chemical reactions can take place between the materials used to create new substances.

Chemicals can also be harmful because of the specific combinations they are used in, Muncke adds—something known as “mixture toxicity.” It thus makes little sense to regulate the amounts of individual substances in cups, she says, because you still can’t be sure what impact they’ll have.

Improving recycling practices would be a logical step in trying to keep harmful chemicals from ending up in nature, but researchers say it’s best to retire disposable paper cups altogether. It’s difficult for most recycling centers to separate the plastic coating from the cup’s paper. In the UK, for instance, a mere handful of recycling centers take paper cups. Many coffee shops will collect them for recycling—but having to drop paper cups off takes the convenience out of a single-use product. Today, only four out of every 100 paper cups are recycled in the UK.

Plus, leaching chemicals isn’t just a problem when paper cups are littered—it can begin when a cup is used. In 2019, a research group from India filled paper cups with hot water to see if plastic particles or chemicals were released. “What came as a surprise to us was the number of microplastic particles that leached into the hot water within 15 minutes,” Anuja Joseph, a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, wrote in an email. On average, there were 25,000 particles per 100 ml cup. The researchers also found traces of harmful chemicals and heavy metals in the water and plastic lining, respectively.

“Reusable” cups aren’t necessarily much better when it comes to leaching, as they are often made of plastic; heat and wear accelerates leaching, and acidic drinks like coffee absorb chemicals more easily. The carbon footprint of reusable plastic cups is also disputable: A reusable cup has to be used between 20 and 100 times to offset its greenhouse gas emissions compared to a disposable one, according to some estimates. Blame the high amount of energy needed to make the reusable cup durable and the hot water needed to wash it. That said, a reusable plastic cup at least has the potential to last longer and is easier to recycle.

For Carney Almroth, reusable plastic cups aren’t the answer; fewer raw materials should be extracted and processed into plastics, she believes. “But we also need to look at the alternatives that are put forth as we make a shift into something more sustainable to make sure that we’re not just replacing one product with another,” she says. Carney Almroth is part of a coalition of scientists contributing evidence to the negotiations for a global plastics treaty. Those talks will continue in Kenya this November.

In the meantime, the search is on for safer and more sustainable solutions. Some companies have baked edible cups made of waffles or biscuits, or have used an origami-like technique to fold paper into cups. Both Carney Almroth and Muncke see the potential for companies to use established materials to shape a circular economy. Then the coffee shops could more easily replace their low-cost plastic and paper cups.

Take glass, for instance, which keeps drinks warm for longer—its low thermal conductivity slows the heat in the liquid from dispersing in the cup—and it is chemically inert, meaning no leaching (even the glaze of a ceramic cup is slightly soluble and can leach out to some degree). But although glass is infinitely recyclable, it has a higher environmental footprint than plastic. It’s made from natural raw materials such as sand, which have to be mined and melted at very high temperatures.

Stainless steel, a metal commonly used for reusable water bottles, is another contender. But coffee in steel cups cools faster than it would in ceramic and glass cups because the heat is transferred to the material and then to the palm of your hand. However, the material is more robust, making it good for on-the-go drinks.

Regardless of which material proves successful, moving away from disposable cups will take innovative business models and approaches, says Muncke. By this, she means companies finding a viable way to rent out and collect reusable cups, wash them appropriately, make sure they’re not contaminated, and then put them back into circulation. “The difficult thing is changing people’s behavior and building all the infrastructure. And that costs a lot of money.” Convenience and cheapness will make disposable cups hard to overthrow.

Original article is from 2018, but this is still going

https://globalnews.ca/news/9918597/bc-herbicide-broadleaf-wildfire-risk/

Heatflation has doubled the price of olive oil over the past year.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

Inflation is finally easing. Americans are paying less for gas than they were a year ago. Furniture, television, and airfare prices have all fallen since last summer. Even the used car market is cooling off after its meteoric rise. But one unsuspecting staple in many American kitchens has become a prominent outlier: olive oil. The price of the already pricey liquid fat has soared to a record high this summer.

It’s the latest chapter in the annals of heatflation — when scorching temperatures harm crops and push food prices up. A yearlong drought and a spring of extreme heat in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, devastated the country’s olive groves. Spanish olive oil production fell by a half — from an estimated 1.3 million to 610,000 metric tons — over the past year. Now fears are mounting over the very real possibility that the country’s inventory will run out before the next harvest begins, in October.

“For Spaniards, this is a real crisis,” Bloomberg columnist Javier Bias recently wrote. “We generously coat our food in olive oil.”

It’s also a big deal for the rest of us, given that something like half of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain. As barrels run dry, cooks around the world are paying an almost unheard of premium for the nutty, liquid gold that makes lettuce more palatable and bread more nutritious. Worldwide, olive oil now costs $8,600 per metric ton, more than twice as much as it did a year ago and nearly 14 times more than crude oil. (It would set you back around $720 to fill up the typical car’s 12-gallon tank with olive oil found on Amazon.)

What’s happening is “not normal at all,” said Kyle Holland, a vegetable oils analyst at Mintec, a food market research firm. “It was just too hot and too dry for too long.”

Olive oil is one of many foods — one of many condiments, even — that are threatened by the severe and unpredictable weather brought on by climate change. As the global temperature ticks up, droughts are occurring more frequently, heat is getting harder for farmers to manage, and wildfires and floods are becoming more menacing to growers around the world. As a result, grocery store shelves aren’t getting stocked and food prices are going up. Ultra-dry conditions in Mexico have withered peppers, leading to a sriracha shortage in the United States. Record warming has decimated Georgia’s famed peaches, which require a few weeks of cool weather each winter to blossom. Ketchup, coffee, and wine all could end up on the chopping block, too.

Olive trees are no strangers to heat, and they don’t need much water compared to other crops, like tomatoes. Humans have been cultivating them in the Mediterranean’s warm climate — and crushing them for oil — for at least 6,000 years. But even hardy olives have their limits. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can impair their ability to convert sunlight into energy, and prolonged dry spells can keep them from producing shoots, buds, flowers, and fruit.

Growers in the Mediterranean, a region warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world and the source of 95 percent of olive oil production, are especially vulnerable. Drought caused Tunisia’s grain harvest to decline by 60 percent this year. And dry conditions led to poor yields for wheat and rice farmers last year in Italy, whose produce has helped build the country’s legacy of pizza, pasta, and risotto. This summer, they’ve had to contend with extreme heat, historic floods, and freak hailstorms, according to Davide Cammarano, a professor of agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. With such variability in weather, “it becomes very hard to manage a crop in the Mediterranean,” he said.

In a study published last year, Cammarano and his colleagues found that rising temperatures could cut the production of processing tomatoes — the sort used to make tomato sauce and ketchup — by 6 percent in Italy, the U.S., and other countries within the next three decades.

Perhaps no one this year has had it as bad as olive growers in Spain. Between October and May, the country received 28 percent less rain than usual, with the driest conditions in southern, olive-growing areas. “It’s a catastrophe,” Primitivo Fernandez, head of Spain’s National Association of Edible Oil Bottlers, told Reuters in March. Spain experienced its hottest April on record, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees F. And the heat has only gotten more punishing since, with the country now in the midst of its third heat wave of the year.

As a result, researchers predict that drought and heat waves associated with climate change will continue to take their toll on olives from the Iberian Peninsula to Lebanon. Hot and dry conditions last year scorched groves not only in Spain but also in Italy and Portugal, two of the world’s top four olive oil producers.

In the United States, too, severe weather is a concern for olive farmers, although unlike orchards in Spain that rely on rainfall, most in the U.S. are irrigated, which makes them more resistant to drought. Producers in California, the state that churns out the most olives but still contributes less than 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., reportedly harvested one-fifth less than their historic average this season, following years of little rain that made some farmers’ wells go dry.

Winter and spring storms last spring in California eased the drought, but the cool weather and heavy precipitation slowed flowering and potentially lowered the amount of oil in each olive, according to Jim Lipman, chief operating officer at California Olive Ranch in Chico, the country’s biggest olive oil producer.

In an email to Grist, Lipman said that the high prices in Europe have increased demand for California oil and that California Olive Ranch has a strong crop heading into the upcoming harvest season, which starts in October. That said, early warming followed by frost has resulted in crop disasters in two of the last five seasons.

At Burroughs Family Farm in Denair, California, production has been fairly steady over the past few years, but “this year we are on the lower side” possibly as a result of an “incredible” amount of rain, said Benina Montes, managing partner at the regenerative almond and olive farm in California’s Central Valley. In a good year, the farm’s 10 acres of olives produce up to 40 tons of oil. This year, they yielded about three-quarters of that amount.

Montes said she hadn’t been following news of the shortage in Europe. But she figures the rise in demand caused by Spain’s low inventory might have helped her business. “No wonder our olive oil has been selling well on Amazon.”

One stop shop for for all of your pedology needs and dank soil compass memes.

[email protected] /c/[email protected]

A small fraction of tropical tree leaves already pass the threshold, scientists estimate, and that number could grow under worst-case climate models.

Leaves in the world’s tropical forests are approaching critical temperatures at which photosynthesis breaks down—and a fraction have likely already passed that threshold—raising alarms about the fate of these essential ecosystems under the most pessimistic projections of human-driven climate change, reports a new study.

Tropical forests are home to roughly half of known species on Earth and they play an essential role in the health and stability of the global climate. While this lush biome is known for its balmy temperatures, tropical leaves start to die off at temperatures exceeding about 46.7°C (or 116.1°F) because they can no longer perform photosynthesis, which is the basic metabolic process of converting sunlight to energy that powers plants.

Scientists led by Christopher Doughty, an associate professor in ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University, have now discovered that about 0.01 percent of leaves in the world’s tropical forests may already surpass this critical temperature in a typical year. While that is a small number right now, the team projected that “tropical forests can withstand up to a 3.9 ± 0.5 °C increase in air temperatures before a potential tipping point in metabolic function,” an outcome that is within the range of “worst case scenario” climate models, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

“We want to understand the future temperatures of tropical forests because they hold most of the world's species” and because “tropical forests are important for their climate regulation properties,” said Doughty in a press briefing held on Monday.

“We started looking at individual leaf temperatures and what we kept seeing, and what kept popping up through multiple datasets, is a ‘long tail’ when you plot the distribution of these leaves,” he continued. “All that means is that if you look at a bunch of leaves in a tree, there's a few that are really approaching these critical thresholds.”

Doughty and his colleagues began their research by examining equatorial forests from space with a sensor called the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), which has been measuring plant temperatures from the International Space Station since 2018.

The ECOSTRESS data, along with follow-up measurements from the ground, showed that tropical canopy temperatures tend to peak at around 34°C, though some regions experienced temperatures that exceeded 40°C. Because there is a surprising amount of temperature variation between the individual leaves on a single tree, the researchers estimated that about a tenth of a percent of all leaves in tropical forests are annually pushed beyond the critical threshold of 46.7°C that marks the breaking point of photosynthesis.

“We have known for a long time that when leaves reach a certain temperature, their photosynthetic machinery breaks down,” said Gregory Goldsmith, a plant physiological ecologist at Chapman University who co-authored the study, in the press briefing. “In fact, the first measurements of that were made more than 150 years ago, but this study is really the first study to establish how close tropical forest canopies may be to these limits.”

“From my perspective, this study is important because believe it or not, we don't know terribly much about why trees die," he continued. “We know that when a tree is knocked over in a storm and loses its roots, it dies. We know how it dies when there's a fire. But we know much less about the interactive effects of heat, drought, water, and temperature. I think this study really helps us begin to fill in the gap.”

As global temperatures continue to rise, more tropical leaves will be pushed beyond their photosynthetic capabilities, causing plants to perish. While the researchers emphasized that there is a lot of uncertainty in their models, they warned that an increase in global air temperatures of about 3.9°C could trigger a major photosynthetic meltdown for tropical forests. This estimated increase is within the range of climate models that project a future where human greenhouse gas emissions don’t begin to fall until after 2080.

On the one hand, it’s frightening to imagine that tropical forests might reach this tipping point under any climate scenario; a collapse of this critical biome would have far-reaching and catastrophic ripple effects for the world’s climate and biodiversity. That said, Doughty and his colleagues stressed that we could avert this disaster by rapidly decreasing our consumption of fossil fuels, which is the main driver of anthropogenic climate change.

“It is still within our power to decide…the fate of these critical realms of carbon, water and biodiversity,” the researchers warned in the study. “The combination of climate change and local deforestation may already be placing the hottest tropical forest regions close to, or even beyond, a critical thermal threshold.”

“Therefore, our results suggest that the combination of ambitious climate change mitigation goals and reduced deforestation can ensure that these important realms of carbon, water and biodiversity stay below thermally critical thresholds,” they concluded.